Actress Joan Sims - known to millions for her roles in the Carry On movies - has died aged 71, her agent has said.
The star, who was in more than 20 of the saucy romps, died on Wednesday.
"She had been ill for some months," said a spokeswoman for her agent.
Her most recent movie was the BBC TV film Last Of The Blonde Bombshells in which she starred with Dame Judi Dench.
In it she revisited her rackety past in an all-girl wartime swing band, tracking down most of her colleagues for a reunion.
Sims's character was a rakish pianist, found playing in a tatty pub at the end of Hastings Pier.
"There were no loos," she said afterwards, "and the easiest way to transport me to the nearest ones, near the pier entrance, was to shove me in a wheelchair.
"Of course, it was pouring with rain, absolutely pouring, and I had this old mac thrown over me and a plastic hat.
"I must have looked like Penny For The Guy."
Her memorable roles included Desiree Dubarry, the lover of police chief Camembert, played by Kenneth Williams, in Carry on Don't Lose Your Head, a spoof on the French Revolution.
There were such characters as Lady Ruff-Diamond, scheming wife to Sid James's viceroy in Carry On Up The Khyber.
Emily Bung, the nagging wife of detective Harry H Corbett in Carry on Screaming.
Long-suffering Cora Flange in Carry On Abroad and policewoman Gloria Passworthy in Carry on Constable.
Once she publicly complained that the cast of the Carry On films received no remuneration for repeat showings on TV or in cinemas.
"I do have deep feelings of injustice for myself and the others.
"The public might think we are paid residuals, but we get nothing for the films or those television compilations."
Sims said that those of the cast who had survived "have been taken for a ride".
In more recent years she received counselling for clinical depression and early last year she said she had beaten a drink problem.
Over the past six or seven years, she suffered a fractured rib, a fractured spine, an attack of Bell's palsy and had a hip-replacement operation.
"I've started to think I might be accident prone," she told a reporter.
Only a year ago, she said she was embarrassed by some of the modern material being screened on television.
"I think some of the programmes on TV now are a bit alarming.
"I can get quite embarrassed seeing some of the things on television. I don't know whether things have to be quite as explicit as they are nowadays. Carry On films were much more innocent."
Sims admitted that her spate of minor injuries had turned her into a "couch potato", watching endless hours of television.
"It makes me sick to see naked people, those naked shows. It makes me absolutely despair of what children are watching."
She never married.
Once she said: "I don't think I've ever had anybody say the words, `Will you marry me?' not even someone tight as a tick at a party."
This obituary appeared on the ITN web site on June 28, 2001.